Climate velocity informs conservation options in a warming world

23 May 2018

A simple measure describing the speed and direction of climate movement could help design future protected areas and conserve ocean biodiversity, a University of Queensland-led international study reveals.

“There is untapped potential for using climate velocity and climate-velocity trajectories to inform the design of new protected areas and their networks, conserve ocean biodiversity, and in planning conservation actions.”

He said the study reviewed the research on climate velocity, highlighted how the metric was already applied in conservation-related research, and how customisation could enhance its usefulness in conservation.

“To stimulate future research using climate velocity, the study introduces a new free package for the statistical computing and graphics software R, called vocc.”

The study, completed by a consortium of researchers in Australia, Japan, South Africa, United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States, is published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution (doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2018.03.009)